Incumbent Democratic PresidentBill Clinton was not eligible to serve a third term, and Vice President Gore was able to secure the Democratic nomination with relative ease. Bush was seen as the early favorite for the Republican nomination, and despite a contentious primary battle with Senator John McCain and other candidates, secured the nomination by Super Tuesday. Many third party candidates also ran, most prominently Ralph Nader. Bush chose former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney as his running mate, and Gore chose Senator Joe Lieberman as his. Both major party candidates focused primarily on domestic issues, such as the budget, tax relief, and reforms for federal social insurance programs, though foreign policy was not ignored. Clinton and Gore did not often campaign together, a deliberate decision resulting from the Lewinsky sex scandal two years prior.

The result of the election hinged on Florida, where the margin of victory triggered a mandatory recount. Litigation in select counties started additional recounts, and this litigation ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court. The Court's contentious decision in Bush v. Gore, announced on December 12, 2000, ended the recounts, effectively awarding Florida's votes to Bush and granting him the victory. This marked the fourth election in U.S. history in which the eventual winner failed to win a plurality of the popular vote (after the elections of 1824, 1876, and 1888). Later studies have reached conflicting opinions on who would have won the recount had it been allowed to proceed.

In addition to Gore's advantage as the incumbent Vice President, Bradley was not the candidate of a major faction or coalition of blocs. Running an insurgency campaign, Bradley positioned himself as the alternative to Gore, who was a founding member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. While former basketball star Michael Jordan campaigned for him in the early primary states, Bradley announced his intention to campaign "in a different way" by conducting a positive campaign of "big ideas". The focus of his campaign was a plan to spend the record-breaking budget surplus on a variety of social welfare programs to help the poor and the middle-class, along with campaign finance reform and gun control.

Gore easily defeated Bradley in the primaries, largely because of support from the Democratic Party establishment and Bradley's poor showing in the Iowa caucus, where Gore successfully painted Bradley as aloof and indifferent to the plight of farmers. The closest Bradley came to a victory was his 50–46 loss to Gore in the New Hampshire primary. On March 14, Al Gore won the Democratic nomination.

Several Republican candidates appeared on the national scene to challenge Gore's candidacy.

George W. Bush became the early front-runner, acquiring unprecedented funding and a broad base of leadership support based on his governorship of Texas and the name recognition and connections of the Bush family. Former cabinet member George Shultz played an important early role in securing establishment Republican support for Bush. In April 1998, he invited Bush to discuss policy issues with experts including Michael Boskin, John Taylor, and Condoleezza Rice. The group, which was "looking for a candidate for 2000 with good political instincts, someone they could work with", was impressed, and Shultz encouraged him to enter the race.[8] Several aspirants withdrew before the Iowa Caucus because they were unable to secure funding and endorsements sufficient to remain competitive with Bush. These included Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Lamar Alexander, and Bob Smith. Pat Buchanan dropped out to run for the Reform Party nomination. That left Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Orrin Hatch as the only candidates still in the race.

On January 24, Bush won the Iowa caucus with 41% of the vote. Forbes came in second with 30% of the vote. Keyes received 14%, Bauer 9%, McCain 5%, and Hatch 1%. Hatch dropped out. On the national stage, Bush was portrayed in the media as the establishment candidate. McCain, with the support of many moderate Republicans and Independents, portrayed himself as a crusading insurgent who focused on campaign reform.

On February 1, McCain won a 49–30% victory over Bush in the New Hampshire primary. Gary Bauer dropped out. After coming in third in Delaware Forbes dropped out, leaving three candidates. In the South Carolina primary, Bush soundly defeated McCain. Some McCain supporters blamed it on the Bush campaign, accusing them of mudslinging and dirty tricks, such as push polling that implied that McCain's adopted Bangladeshi-born daughter was an African-American child he fathered out of wedlock.[9] While McCain's loss in South Carolina damaged his campaign, he won both Michigan and his home state of Arizona on February 22. The primary election that year also affected the South Carolina State House, when a controversy about the Confederate flag flying over the capitol dome prompted the state legislature to move the flag to a less prominent position at a Civil War memorial on the capitol grounds. Most GOP candidates said the issue should be left to South Carolina voters, though McCain later recanted and said the flag should be removed.[10]

On February 24, McCain criticized Bush for accepting the endorsement of Bob Jones University despite its policy banning interracial dating. On February 28, McCain also referred to Rev. Jerry Falwell and televangelist Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance", a term he would later distance himself from during his 2008 bid for the party's nomination. He lost the state of Virginia to Bush on February 29. On Super Tuesday, March 7, Bush won New York, Ohio, Georgia, Missouri, California, Maryland, and Maine. McCain won Rhode Island, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but dropped out of the race. On March 10, Alan Keyes got 21% of the vote in Utah. Bush took the majority of the remaining contests and won the Republican nomination on March 14, winning his home state of Texas and his brother Jeb's home state of Florida among others. At the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia George W. Bush accepted the nomination of the Republican party.

Delegate totals

Governor George W. Bush 1526

Senator John McCain 275

Ambassador Dr. Alan Keyes 23

Businessman Steve Forbes 10

Gary Bauer 2

None of the Names Shown 2

Uncommitted 1

Bush asked former Secretary of DefenseDick Cheney to head up a team to help select a running mate for him, but ultimately, Bush decided that Cheney himself should be the vice presidential nominee. While the U.S. Constitution does not specifically disallow a president and a vice president from the same state, it does prohibit electors from casting both of his or her votes for persons from his or her own state. Accordingly, Cheney—who had been a resident of Texas for nearly 10 years—changed his voting registration back to Wyoming. Had Cheney not done this, either he or Bush would have forfeited their electoral votes from the Texas electors.

The Natural Law Party held its national convention in Arlington, Virginia, August 31 – September 2, nominating a ticket of Hagelin/Goldhaber via unanimous decision without a roll-call vote.[38] The party was on 38 of the 51 ballots nationally.[37]

Although the campaign focused mainly on domestic issues, such as the projected budget surplus, proposed reforms of Social Security and Medicare, health care, and competing plans for tax relief, foreign policy was often an issue. Bush criticized Clinton administration policies in Somalia, where 18 Americans died in 1993 trying to sort out warring factions, and in the Balkans, where United States peacekeeping troops perform a variety of functions. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building," Bush said in the second presidential debate.[39] Bush also pledged to bridge partisan gaps in the nation's capital, claiming the atmosphere in Washington stood in the way of progress on necessary reforms.[40] Gore, meanwhile, questioned Bush's fitness for the job, pointing to gaffes made by Bush in interviews and speeches and suggesting the Texas governor lacked the necessary experience to be president.

Bill Clinton's impeachment and the sex scandal that led up to it cast a shadow on the campaign, particularly on his vice president's run to replace him. Republicans strongly denounced the Clinton scandals, particularly Bush, who made his repeated promise to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House a centerpiece of his campaign. Gore studiously avoided the Clinton scandals, as did Lieberman, even though Lieberman had been the first Democratic senator to denounce Clinton's misbehavior. In fact, some media observers theorized that Gore actually chose Lieberman in an attempt to separate himself from Clinton's past misdeeds, and help blunt the GOP's attempts to link him to his boss.[41] Others pointed to the passionate kiss Gore gave his wife during the Democratic Convention, as a signal that despite the allegations against Clinton, Gore himself was a faithful husband.[42] Gore avoided appearing with Clinton, who was shunted to low visibility appearances in areas where he was popular. Experts have argued that this cost Gore votes from some of Clinton's core supporters.[43][44][45]

Ralph Nader was the most successful of third-party candidates, drawing 2.74 percent of the popular vote. His campaign was marked by a traveling tour of large "super-rallies" held in sports arenas like Madison Square Garden, with retired talk show hostPhil Donahue as master of ceremonies. After initially ignoring Nader, the Gore campaign made a pitch to (potential) Nader supporters in the final weeks of the campaign, downplaying Gore's differences with Nader on the issues and arguing that Gore's ideas were more similar to Nader's than Bush's were, and noting that Gore had a better chance of winning than Nader. On the other side, the Republican Leadership Council ran pro-Nader ads in a few states in an effort to split the liberal vote.[46] In the aftermath of the campaign, many Gore supporters claimed that Nader acted as a spoiler in the election, that Nader votes would have been cast for Gore, and that Nader threw the election outcome to Bush. Nader dismissed such concerns, claiming his objective in the campaign was to pass the 5-percent threshold so his Green Party would be eligible for matching funds in future races.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, formed by Democratic and Republican party leaders, set rules that effectively excluded all but the two major party candidates.[52] Ralph Nader was blocked from attending a closed circuit screening of the first debate in spite of his holding a ticket.[53] He was barred from attending an interview near the site of the third debate in spite of having a "perimeter pass".[54] Nader later sued the CPD for its role in the former incident. A settlement was reached that included an apology to Nader.[55]

Lockbox/Rainy Day fund: Gore's description of what he would do with the federal budget surplus.

Al Gore invented the Internet: an interpretation of a quote by Al Gore in which he said that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet", to say that he was on the committee that funded the research which led to the formation of the Internet.

As the night wore on, the returns in a handful of small-to-medium-sized states, including Wisconsin and Iowa, were extremely close; however it was the state of Florida that would decide the winner of the election. As the final national results were tallied the following morning, Bush had clearly won a total of 246 electoral votes, while Gore had won 255 votes. 270 votes were needed to win. Two smaller states—New Mexico (5 electoral votes) and Oregon (7 electoral votes)—were still too close to call. It was Florida (25 electoral votes), however, that the news media focused their attention on. Mathematically, Florida's 25 electoral votes became the key to an election win for either candidate. Although both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of Gore over the next few days, Florida's statewide vote took center stage because that state's winner would ultimately win the election. The outcome of the election was not known for more than a month after the balloting ended because of the extended process of counting and then recounting Florida's presidential ballots.

Between 7:50 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. EST on election day, just as the polls closed in the largely Republican Florida panhandle, which is in the Central time zone, all major television news networks (CNN, NBC, FOX, CBS, MSNBC, and ABC) declared that Gore had carried Florida's 25 electoral votes. They based this prediction substantially on exit polls. However, in the actual vote tally Bush began to take a wide lead early in Florida, and by 10 p.m. EST the networks had retracted that prediction and placed Florida back into the "undecided" column. At approximately 2:30 a.m., with some 85% of the votes counted in Florida and Bush leading Gore by more than 100,000 votes, the networks declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore had been elected President. However, most of the remaining votes to be counted in Florida were located in three heavily Democratic counties—Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach—and as their votes were reported Gore began to gain on Bush. By 4:30 a.m., after all votes were counted, Gore had narrowed Bush's margin to just over 2,000 votes, and the networks retracted their predictions that Bush had won Florida and the presidency. Gore, who had privately conceded the election to Bush, withdrew his concession. The final result in Florida was slim enough to require a mandatory recount (by machine) under state law; Bush's lead had dwindled to about 300 votes by the time it was completed later that week. A count of overseas military ballots later boosted his margin to about 900 votes.

Florida Supreme Court

Most of the post-electoral controversy revolved around Gore's request for hand recounts in four counties (Broward, Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia), as provided under Florida state law. Florida Secretary of StateKatherine Harris announced she would reject any revised totals from those counties if they were not turned in by November 14, the statutory deadline for amended returns. The Florida Supreme Court extended the deadline to November 26, a decision later vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court. Miami-Dade eventually halted its recount and resubmitted its original total to the state canvassing board, while Palm Beach County failed to meet the extended deadline. On November 26, the state canvassing board certified Bush the winner of Florida's electors by 537 votes. Gore formally contested the certified results, but a state court decision overruling Gore was reversed by the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered a recount of over 70,000 ballots previously rejected by machine counters. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly halted that order the next day with the concurring opinion that a recount of votes "of questionable legality does [...] threaten irreparable harm" to Bush as "each manual recount produces a degradation of the ballots."[56]

On December 12, the Supreme Court ruled in a 7–2 vote that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling requiring a statewide recount of ballots was unconstitutional, and in a 5–4 vote that the Florida recounts could not be completed before a December 12 "safe harbor" deadline, and should therefore cease and the previously certified total should hold.

Though Gore came in second in the electoral vote, he received 543,895 more popular votes than Bush.[57] Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state, Tennessee, which both he and his father had represented in the Senate, making him the first major-party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972. Furthermore, Gore lost West Virginia, a state that had voted Republican only once in the previous six presidential elections.[58] A victory in either of these two states would have given Gore enough Electoral Votes to win the Presidency.

Bush lost in Connecticut, the state of his birth. Bush is also the first Republican in American history to win the presidency without winning Vermont or Illinois, the second Republican to win the presidency without winning California (James A. Garfield in 1880 was the first), and the only winning Republican not to receive any electoral votes from California (Garfield received one vote in 1880).

★Maine and Nebraska each allow for their electoral votes to be split between candidates. In both states, two electoral votes are awarded to the winner of the statewide race and one electoral vote is awarded to the winner of each congressional district. The following table records the official presidential vote tallies for Maine and Nebraska's congressional districts.[60][61]

After Florida was decided and Gore conceded, Texas GovernorGeorge W. Bush became the President-elect and began forming his transition committee.[62] In a speech on December 13, in the Texas House of Representatives chamber,[63] Bush stated he was reaching across party lines to bridge a divided America, saying, "the President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race, and every background."[64]

Subsequently, the joint session of Congress certified the electoral votes from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001. He would serve for the next eight years. Gore declined to run for president in 2004 and 2008.

The first independent recount was conducted by the Miami Herald and USA Today. The commission found that under most recount scenarios, Bush would have won the election, but Gore would have won using the most generous standards.[66]

Ultimately, a media consortium—comprising the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Tribune Co. (parent of the Los Angeles Times), Associated Press, CNN, Palm Beach Post and St. Petersburg Times[67]—hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago[68] to examine 175,010 ballots that were collected from the entire state, not just the disputed counties that were discounted; these ballots contained undervotes (votes with no choice made for president) and overvotes (votes made with more than one choice marked). Their goal was to determine the reliability and accuracy of the systems used for the voting process. The NORC concluded that if the disputes over the validity of all the ballots statewide in question had been consistently resolved and any uniform standard applied, the electoral result would have been reversed and Gore would have won by 107–115 votes if only two of the three coders had to agree on the ballot. When counting ballots wherein all three coders agreed, Gore would have won the most restrictive scenario by 127 votes and Bush would have won the most inclusive scenario by 110 votes. Inclusive in media reporting likely refers to including the undervotes (only) as these people were then included in the vote. Whether overvotes were truly nullified in counts is not known.[69]

Subsequent analyses cast further doubt on conclusions that Bush likely would have won anyway, had the U.S. Supreme Court not intervened. An analysis of the NORC data by University of Pennsylvania researcher Steven F. Freeman and journalist Joel Bleifuss concluded that a recount of all uncounted votes using any standard (inclusive, strict, statewide or county by county), Gore would have been the victor.[70] Such a statewide review including all uncounted votes was a very real possibility, as Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, whom the Florida Supreme Court had assigned to oversee the statewide recount, had scheduled a hearing for December 13 (mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court's final ruling on the 12th) to consider the question of including overvotes as well as undervotes, and subsequent statements by Judge Lewis and internal court documents support the likelihood of including overvotes in the recount.[71]Florida State University professor of public policy Lance deHaven-Smith observed that, even considering only undervotes, "under any of the five most reasonable interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court ruling, Gore does, in fact, more than make up the deficit".[72]Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting's analysis of the NORC study and media coverage of it supports these interpretations and criticizes the coverage of the study by media outlets such as the New York Times and the other media consortium members.[67]

Because the 2000 presidential election was so close in Florida, the United States government and state governments pushed for election reform to be prepared by the 2004 presidential election. Many of Florida's year 2000 election night problems stemmed from usability and ballot design factors with voting systems, including the potentially confusing "butterfly ballot". Many voters had difficulties with the paper-based punch card voting machines and were either unable to understand the required process for voting or unable to perform the process. This resulted in an unusual amount of overvote (voting for more candidates than is allowed) and undervotes (voting for fewer than the minimum candidates, including none at all). Many undervotes were potentially caused by either voter error or errors with the punch card paper ballots resulting in hanging, dimpled, or pregnant chad.

A proposed solution to these problems was the installation of modern electronic voting machines. The United States Presidential Election of 2000 spurred the debate about election and voting reform, but it did not end it.

The Voter News Service's reputation was damaged by its treatment of Florida's presidential vote in 2000. Breaking its own guidelines, VNS called the state as a win for Gore 12 minutes before polls closed in the Florida panhandle. Although most of the state is in the Eastern Time Zone, counties in the Florida panhandle, located in the Central Time Zone, had not yet closed their polls. More seriously, inconsistent polling results caused the VNS to change its call twice, first from Gore to Bush, and then to "too close to call".

Also, charges of media bias were levied against the networks by Republicans. They claimed that the networks called states more quickly for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. Congress held hearings on this matter and the networks claimed to have no intentional bias in their election night reporting. However, a study of the calls made on election night 2000 indicated that states carried by Gore were called more quickly than states won by Bush; however, notable Bush states, like New Hampshire and Florida, were very close, and close Gore states like Iowa, Oregon, New Mexico and Wisconsin were called late as well.[73]

In the aftermath of the election, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed to help states upgrade their election technology in the hopes of preventing similar problems in future elections. Unfortunately, the electronic voting systems that many states purchased to comply with HAVA actually caused problems in the presidential election of 2004.[74]

Many Democrats blame third party candidate Ralph Nader, claiming he split votes with Gore. Nader received 97,000 votes in Florida (for comparison, there were 111,251 overvotes).[75] Additionally, Nader received 22,000 votes in New Hampshire, where Bush beat Gore by 7,000 votes. Either state would have won the election for Gore. Defenders of Nader, including Dan Perkins, argued that the margin in Florida was small enough that Democrats could blame any number of third-party candidates for the defeat, including Workers World Party candidate Monica Moorehead, who received 1,500 votes.[76] But the controversy with Nader also drained energy from the Democratic party as divisive debate went on in the months leading up to the election. Nader's reputation was hurt by this perception, and may have hindered his goals as an activist. For example, Mother Jones wrote, "For evidence of how rank-and-file liberals have turned against Nader, one need look no further than the empire he created. Public Citizen, the organization (Nader) founded in 1971, has a new fundraising problem—its founder. After the election, contributions dropped... When people inquire about Nader's relationship to the organization, Public Citizen sends out a letter that begins with a startling new disclaimer: 'Although Ralph Nader was our founder, he has not held an official position in the organization since 1980 and does not serve on the board. Public Citizen—and the other groups that Mr. Nader founded—act independently.'"[77]

Democratic party strategist and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) chair Al From expressed a different view. In the January 24, 2001, issue[78] of the DLC's Blueprint magazine,[79] he wrote, "I think they're wrong on all counts. The assertion that Nader's marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. When exit pollers asked voters how they would have voted in a two-way race, Bush actually won by a point. That was better than he did with Nader in the race."

In their 2007 book The Nightly News Nightmare: Network Television's Coverage of US Presidential Elections, 1988-2004, professors Stephen J. Farnsworth and S. Robert Lichter alleged most media outlets influenced the outcome of the election through the use of horse race journalism.[80] Some liberal supporters of Al Gore argued that the media had a bias against Gore and in favor of Bush. Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas, two commentators for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), called the media "serial exaggerators" and alleged that several media outlets were constantly exaggerating criticism of Gore:[81] they alleged that the media falsely claimed Gore lied when he claimed he spoke in an overcrowded science class in Sarasota, Florida,[81] and also alleged the media supposedly gave Bush a pass on certain issues, such as the fact that Bush allegedly exaggerated how much money he signed into the annual Texas state budget to help the uninsured during his second debate with Gore in October 2000.[81] In the April 2000 issue of Washington Monthly, columnist Robert Parry also alleged that media outlets exaggerated Gore's supposed claim that he "discovered" the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York during a campaign speech in Concord, New Hampshire on November 30, 1999,[82] when he had only claimed he "found" it after it was already evacuated in 1978 because of chemical contamination.[82]Rolling Stone columnist Eric Boehlert also alleged that media outlets exaggerated criticism of Gore as early as July 22, 1999,[83] when Gore, known for being an environmentalist, had a friend release 500 million gallons of water into a drought stricken river to help keep his boat afloat for a photo shoot;[83] media outlets, Boehlert claimed, exaggerated the actual number of gallons that were released and claimed it was 4 billion.[83]

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